the serialised prose of the nineteenth century.

TV In this rather beautiful essay on my favourite type of television -- serial dramas -- Richard Beck looks for commonalities in design and audience experience between the serialised prose of the nineteenth century and modern US network television from Hill Street Blues onwards. He notes that the passion for the writer seen in our collective veneration of the likes of Aaron Sorkin or Joss Whedon was just as potent back then:

In the nineteenth century, serial novels worked hard to accommodate themselves to industrial daily life. As the bourgeois workday rigidified into something like a nine-to-five, leisure time became repetitive as well. Serialization allowed people to set aside time for reading at evenly spaced intervals, and thus helped to keep the alternating sequence of work and leisure running smoothly along. Interruptions in the publication of a serial work could be very upsetting. When Dickens failed to produce an installment of Pickwick in June 1837, his publishers sent out notices all over, and the July number included an explanation refuting rumors that he had gone insane and died. Apparently, readers could not have imagined a less catastrophic explanation for the interruption of their favorite novel.

Perhaps its a good job that more than one writer is working on Buffy Season Eight. Later on there's a perfect description of Lost which sadly turned up too late for me to write about it in my dissertation about genre and narrative in hyperlink drama:

"Lost also dismantles (or at least ignores) the boundaries separating serial television’s well-established collection of genres. A typical episode may begin with an emergency medical procedure, like E.R. in a jungle hut. But then someone will discover a bomb, or a computer station, or a plane in a tree, and lead Jack and his still-recovering patient on a police-style chase. Then someone will be interrogated and tortured, à la 24, until a creature made of thick smoke bursts out of the ground and interrupts everything. Then, flashing variously forward and backward, we spend time with the Korean mob or African drug-runners. Then everybody time-travels, gets sick in the process, and needs Jack to put the gun down and become a doctor again. [...] Lost provides the delirious feeling of watching serial television swallow itself whole."

Sadly, the final paragraph of my conclusion mentioned Six Degrees as the possible future instead. Incidentally, no I haven't seen the finale season yet. I don't have Sky. I'm wating for the blu-ray release [via].